Dovetail Software Blogs

"Increasingly, companies are turning to customer experience initiatives to boost the bottom line, but it's an effort that requires cooperation across the organization and extends beyond just CRM, research from Gartner Inc. suggests. In fact, targeting, attracting and retaining new customers remains a top priority for CIOs this year, a Gartner survey of 1,500 CIOs worldwide found. Yet CIOs have little involvement in customer experience initiatives, according to Ed Thompson, research vice president with the Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm."

"But according to Schmelzer, most SOA integration projects aren’t actually SOA at all. If you’re using middleware — usually an ESB — to manage service communications, then you’re practicing Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 2.0, not service-oriented architecture, he contends. The ESBs are actually being used as an EAI hub-and-spoke or message-bus brokers facilitating Web services integration, which, he stresses, is not the same thing as a SOA."

"Because of its name, you'd think that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) would have grown up around supporting the entire customer relationships. But in truth, Customer Support has always been a bit of a third wheel to the more dominant Sales and Marketing components of CRM. Enterprises have traditionally viewed Sales and Marketing as drivers of revenue, and therefore can easily justify their investments in technology to support bringing in new customers. Customer Service has been shortchanged because it's viewed as a cost center."

"One of the things that I have heard from time to time is that customers are assets and they need to be managed like assets. When I hear this I think of warehouses and forklifts, or depots and plant. Can we think of customers as assets and our CRM as an asset management system?"

"AMR showed adoption growth rates of 100% in 2007 with more room for growth. 53% of survey respondents have active SOA projects with an average spend of $1.4M. Let’s hope SOA is somewhat recession proof."

"Masterminds tend to stay in the background and only insert themselves into leadership roles when they see others fail. Masterminds represent only 1% of the population. If you combine the Field Marshals and Masterminds you only have 3% of the population that represent the characteristics of a Chief Architect. Enterprise architects fall into the inventors and architects types which make up only about 3-5% of the population."